Your sorrow is excessive, and therefore sinful, when it blinds you to the grand purposes of Providence. Poor Job saith, "My soul is weary of my life," and again and again he desireth the quiet shelter of the grave. Yet do we find him piously inquiring into the reasons and final causes of the Almighty's mysterious dealings with him: "I will say unto God, Do not condemn me; show me wherefore thou contendest with me." We are well assured that "affliction cometh not forth of the dust, neither doth trouble spring out of the ground." All things are under the restraint and control of Infinite Wisdom and Love. In every pain you suffer, whether appointed or permitted only, God is seeking your good. It were a double loss, doubly aggravated, first to lose your friend, and then to lose the benefit of the loss. Is not the loss of the former sufficient, without adding to it, by your immoderate grief, the infinitely greater loss of the latter? Your sorrow is excessive, and therefore sinful, when it refuses the proffered consolations of friendship. When Jacob rent his robe, and put sackcloth upon his loins, and mourned many days for Joseph, and all his sons and daughters rose up to comfort him, he refused to be comforted, saying, "I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning." "In Ramah was a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, refuseth to be comforted because they are not." To decline the needed consolation when it is offered, is certainly a sin. There is some little excuse for the children of Israel in Egypt, when Moses spake unto them of the promised deliverance, and "they hearkened not unto him for anguish of spirit and for cruel bondage." The dying Rachel would have called her son Benoni, "the son of my sorrow," but that would have been too sad a remembrancer to Jacob of his beloved wife, and he called him Benjamin, "the son of my right hand."